Between 1901, when the Nobel Prizes were first awarded, and 1939, when the war began, Jews won a share of the Nobel Prizes far out of proportion to their numbers. Jews were around 0.7 per cent of the world’s population. They won around 14 per cent of the Nobel Prizes awarded in those years.
The list of pre-war Jewish laureates is long. In Physics: Albert Einstein (1921), Niels Bohr (1922, half-Jewish), Gustav Hertz (1925), James Franck (1925), Otto Stern (1943, work done before the war). In Chemistry: Adolf von Baeyer (1905), Henri Moissan (1906), Otto Wallach (1910), Richard Willstatter (1915), Fritz Haber (1918), Otto Meyerhof (1922), Carl Landsteiner (1930). In Medicine and Physiology: Elie Metchnikoff (1908), Paul Ehrlich (1908), Robert Barany (1914), Otto Warburg (1931), Otto Loewi (1936). In Literature: Henri Bergson (1927). In Peace: Tobias Asser (1911), Alfred Fried (1911).
Most of these names were German, Austrian, Hungarian, French or Russian Jews. They were the products of the great century of Jewish emancipation in Europe, when Jews who had been kept out of the universities for hundreds of years were finally let in, and made full use of the chance.
What happened to them
Some had died before the Nazis came to power. Of those still alive in 1933, almost all were forced out of their jobs. Einstein was in California giving lectures when Hitler took office and never returned to Germany. James Franck resigned his chair at Gottingen in protest at the dismissal of Jewish colleagues, and emigrated to the United States in 1935. Otto Meyerhof escaped from France in 1940 by walking over the Pyrenees. Otto Loewi was arrested in Vienna after the Anschluss and forced to surrender his Nobel Prize money to the regime in exchange for permission to leave the country. Fritz Haber, who had developed the process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen and been a fervent German patriot in the First World War, was driven into exile by the same regime he had served, and died in 1934 on his way to take up a post in Palestine.
Some did not get out. Tadeusz Reichstein, who would win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1950, escaped from Poland to Switzerland. Many other Jewish scientists who would have been candidates for future Nobel Prizes were murdered.
What it meant
The flight of Jewish scientists from Germany and Austria in the 1930s changed the balance of world science. The American physics that built the atomic bomb was led in large part by men who had been driven out of central Europe: Einstein, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann. Hans Bethe, Felix Bloch, Rudolf Peierls and many others worked on the project. Germany, which had been the world centre of physics in 1930, was no longer the world centre of physics in 1945. The regime had emptied its own universities of the people who would have made its bomb.
See also
- Sigmund Freud Albert Einstein and Jewish Intellectuals in Exile
- Switzerland
- Adolf Hitler
- Jewish Contributions to European Civilisation
- The Jews of Salonika
- The Judenrat
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards